Includes bibliographical references (p. [441]-453) and index

Gathering at Faneuil Hall -- "There in the woods" -- Yankees in Armenia -- Sultan and the Armenian question -- Killing fields: Massacres of the 1890s -- Humanity on trial: Clara Barton and America's mission to Armenia -- Walking skeletons -- "The tears of Araxes": Voice of the Womans's journal -- Ottoman bank incident and the aftermath of the Hamidian massacres -- "Our boasted civilization": Intellectuals, popular culture, and the Armenian massacres of the 1890s -- Rise of the young Turks -- Adana, 1909: Counterrevolution and massacre -- Balkan wars and World War I: Road to genocide -- Government-planned genocide -- Van, spring 1915 -- April 24 -- Ambassador at the crossroads -- News from the American consul in Harput -- Land of dead -- From Jesse Jackson in Aleppo -- "Same fate": Reports from all over Turkey -- America's golden rule: Working for Armenia again -- Wilson's quandary -- Rise of a new Turkish nationalism and the campaign against Armenia -- Turkish confessions: Ottoman courts-martial, Constantinople, 1919-1920 -- American mandate for Armenia -- New U.S. oil policy in the Middle East and the turnabout on the Armenian question -- Epilogue : Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide and U.S. complicity

In this groundbreaking history of the Armenian Genocide, the critically acclaimed author of the memoir Black Dog of Fate brings us a riveting narrative of the massacres of the Armenians in the 1890s and genocide in 1915 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Using rarely seen archival documents and remarkable first-person accounts, Peter Balakian presents the chilling history of how the Young Turk government implemented the first modern genocide behind the cover of World War I. And in the telling, he also resurrects an extraordinary lost chapter of American history. During the United States' ascension in the global arena at the turn of the twentieth century, America's humanitarian movement for Armenia was an important part of the rising nation's first epoch of internationalism. Intellectuals, politicians, diplomats, religious leaders, and ordinary citizens came together to try to save the Armenians. The Burning Tigris reconstructs this landmark American cause that was spearheaded by the passionate commitments and commentaries of a remarkable cast of public figures, including Julia Ward Howe, Clara Barton, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alice Stone Blackwell, Stephen Crane, and Ezra Pound, as well as courageous missionaries, diplomats, and relief workers who recorded their eyewitness accounts and often risked their lives in the killing fields of Armenia. The crisis of the "starving Armenians" was so embedded in American popular culture that, in an age when a loaf of bread cost a nickel, the American people sent more than $100 million in aid through the American Committee on Armenian Atrocities and its successor, Near East Relief

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews